America’s Image Problem

The United States definitely sends mixed messages to the Muslim
world. Early in his presidency, Barack Obama went to Cairo to “seek a
new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world,
one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the
truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in
competition.” The president proclaimed
that America and Islam “share common principles — principles of justice
and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”

That all sounds good. Unfortunately, the image has proven stronger
than the word. When Muslims around the world turn on the television,
open the newspaper, or check out their favorite websites, they are more
likely to see injustice, intolerance, and indignity coming from America
the (Not Always So) Beautiful. It’s not just the iconic Abu Ghraib
pictures from the Bush era. Muslims — and, of course, everyone else —
can get outraged over the picture of Syed Wali Shah, a 7-year-old victim of a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan. Or the video of laughing Marines urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.

And now with the picture of a partially burned Quran — part of a
rescued remnant of copies that troops at the Bagram Air Force Base in
Afghanistan threw into a garbage pit for incineration — the world’s
Muslims can be excused for believing that the Cairo speech was only
words. You’d think the U.S. Army would be a little more careful. Last
April, when members of the Dove World Outreach Center burned a Quran
after putting it on trial, riots broke out in Afghanistan and left
scores of people dead, including seven U.N. staff.

This time around, the Pentagon insists that the act was inadvertent.
That may well be so, but you can’t see “inadvertent” in a picture. In a
country where the literacy rate is 28%, the third-lowest in the world, a picture can indeed be worth a gazillion words. The United States obviously has a serious image problem.

Here’s the paradox. The U.S. Army, which is actively working with
Afghans, sponsors what seems like an endless series of cultural
awareness workshops to facilitate cooperation. The Marines have mandatory cultural training; you can do pre-deployment training online with the Army; there’s cultural role-playing in a replica of an Afghan village
at Fort Polk in Louisiana. Since it works in Muslim-majority countries
around the world — Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait — the Pentagon takes
great pains to avoid charges of Islamophobia.

Yet the Pentagon still manages to fall into the same category as that
other famous Quran burner, Terry Jones, the Florida preacher who could
endure several lifetimes of cultural sensitivity training and remain a
knucklehead. Believe it or not, Jones is running for president on a platform
of reducing military spending and bringing all U.S. troops home from
overseas. No, Jones has not suddenly become a peace activist. He still
issues threats to burn more Qurans, most recently as a response
to the possible execution of an Iranian pastor. But he is the more
honest Islamophobe. He genuinely wants to stay away from all Muslims,
just as an arachnophobe wants to stay away from all spiders, however
irrational the fear might be.

So, how is it that the Pentagon and the Islamophobe, with their
opposite views on Islam and intervention, end up generating a similar
response in the Muslim world? The answer lies in the image that the
Pentagon has of the Muslim world. This is America’s other image problem.

U.S. military operations involve an implicit distinction between
“good Muslims” and “bad Muslims.” The “bad Muslims” are, of course, the
Taliban, who demonstrated during their brief and bloody reign that they
interpret the Quran much as Terry Jones interprets the New Testament
and Bibi Netanyahu interprets the Old Testament. It’s not a question of
fundamentalism. There’s really no such thing as Islamic fundamentalism,
for nearly all Muslims take the Quran to be the literal word of God
(and “fundamentalism” is really a Protestant invention anyway). Rather,
it’s a question of interpretation, and the Taliban have ignored all the
teachings of the Quran that contradict their own medieval beliefs about
women, religious tolerance, and warfare.

The “good Muslims,” meanwhile, are Hamid Karzai and all the Afghans
who are willing to fight alongside coalition forces. Coalition forces,
however, deep down don’t trust their Afghan partners. More than once,
Karzai has threatened to quit and join the Taliban himself. And Afghan government soldiers have not just threatened to quit; they’ve done so
and brought their sophisticated American-made weapons with them to the
Taliban. Last June, Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis visited a coalition base in
the Zharay district of Kandahar province and watched as Afghan
policemen ignored orders to stop suspected Taliban. “To a man, the U.S.
officers in that unit told me they had nothing but contempt for the
Afghan troops in their area,” reports Davis in an Armed Forces Journal article,
“and that was before the above incident occurred.” It was also before
an Afghan intelligence officer, in the wake of the inadvertent Quran
burning, killed two American servicemen working in the Afghan Interior
Ministry, prompting Washington to pull out all its advisers from the
Afghan ministries. Since the start of last year, Afghans wearing police
or army uniforms have killed at least 36 U.S. and NATO troops.

It’s not that Afghans are inherently untrustworthy. Rather, the
United States has put them in an untenable position. They must choose
between supporting unpalatable insiders and unpalatable outsiders.

But it’s actually worse than this. “A particularly frustrating
feature of the U.S. narrative, for Muslims, is that it divides Muslim
society into a progressive liberal and secular sector on one hand and on
the other a regressive Islamist sector that seeks to impose backward
Islamic traditions. America then seeks to promote the liberal forces and
to undermine the Islamist forces,” explains
pollster Steven Kull. “It is particularly infuriating to Muslims when
America intervenes in a way that is destabilizing, trying to root for
one imagined side against another, in what Americans conceive of as an
inevitable evolution toward the victory of one side.”

We think we’re helping them. They think we’re out to destroy their way of life.

Even with all the sensitivity trainings in the world, which amount to
little more than lipsticking the pig, the U.S. Army remains an
occupation force in Afghanistan. This occupation force has stirred the
nationalist impulses of Afghans, prompted the use of desperate measures
such as suicide bombings, and created the semblance of a crusade by the
West against Islam. The wars conducted in Afghanistan and Iraq have had
little to do with Islam per se. They have been about geopolitics,
natural resources, and the reassertion of U.S. military power. But many
in the Islamic world view these conflicts as an assault on their
religion. The Quran burning is not the only indignity. Afghans, points out FPIF contributor Julia Heath,
“don’t approve of how U.S. troops bring dogs into their homes or touch
their women, because these are culturally offensive actions. Shopkeeper
Wali Aziz says, ‘They [U.S. troops] are careless with our holy things,
and they are careless with our country.’” Whenever such desecrations
take place, they reinforce the notion that religion is at the heart of
the conflict rather than at the periphery.

It doesn’t help that so many U.S. politicians talk about Islam as
though it were the greatest enemy of humanity. President Obama was quick
to apologize for the latest Quran burning outrage. But Republicans
were equally quick to seize on the apology as proof of Obama’s
“weakness,” as Rick Santorum put it. Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich piled
on with their own criticisms of the president’s diplomatic gesture.
Indeed, rarely does a day go by in the Republican primaries that one of
the candidates doesn’t defame Islam. Santorum and Gingrich have both
laid it on thick with their wild accusations about the threat of Shariah
law and their misrepresentations of the Park51 Islamic cultural center.

“So far, Mitt Romney has largely remained above the fray,” I write in an Other Words op-ed, “Running Against Islam.”
“He often resorts to carefully couched phrases like ‘Islam is not an
inherently violent faith.’ But the man who has changed his position on
so many issues may well be laying the groundwork for another flip-flop. Walid Phares,
a right-wing pundit and prominent Islamophobe, is one of Romney’s
advisers. And the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future is
masterminded by Larry McCarthy, the attack-ad specialist. McCarthy not
only designed the Willie Horton spot that swung the 1988
presidential race in George H.W. Bush’s favor; he also put together an
error-laced ad about Park51 that nearly deep-sixed Iowa Democrat Rep.
Bruce Braley in his 2010 reelection bid.”

Sure, we could try to send all the Republican candidates and some
Democrats as well down to Fort Polk to train alongside U.S. soldiers and
learn how to behave respectfully toward Muslims. But even if they
become as diplomatic as Mr. Sensitivity himself, Barack Obama, the
United States continues to wage war in predominantly Muslim countries,
and fire-starters like Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer continue to
badmouth not Islam or “bad Muslims” or “Islamic radicalism,” but
mainstream Islam itself. Park51, which expanded the Geller-Spencer
soapbox to monstrous proportions, was hardly the threat they made it out
to be. If they’d only bothered to read the writings of the cultural
center’s founder, they might have discovered a philosophical
co-religionist.

As I write in my new book, Crusade 2.0: The West’s Resurgent War on Islam,
“Ironically, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf was just the kind of ‘good Muslim’
that conservatives loved to cozy up to in order to prove that they were
not Islamophobic. In his writings, the imam quotes approvingly from
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and conservative literary critic
Allan Bloom, lauds corporate power unfettered by state control, believes
that ‘anti-religionism crept in as a new state religion’ in the 20th
century, and condemns Hamas as a terrorist organization.” But
for all his conservative tendencies, the imam remains an imam. In the
eyes of Geller and Spencer, the only good Muslim is a secular Muslim.

Somehow we must combine a principled engagement with the Muslim world
with a principled withdrawal from areas of combat. If the troops don’t
come home and the drones don’t stop killing civilians, fine speeches and
sensitivity trainings will just seem like hypocrisy, our words and our
images will remain far apart, and the chasm between the West and Islam
will endure, nowhere more so than in the imaginations of those twin
extremists, the Taliban and the Islamophobes.

"In the eyes of Geller and Spencer, the only good Muslim is a secular Muslim."
===
Must be a typo. I think you meant "In the eyes of Geller and Spencer, the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim." No?

smithy1000

Obama went to egypt to give that speech because his handlers wanted him to influence the elections in Lebanon and Iran which were going to happen withing a month or so of his speech. It was total manipulation. Obama was not sincere. That was the moment that I realized exactly what kind of person Obama is. I have not watched him once since that time. I will not vote for him again. In my opinion he is the worst of the worst. He gave them hope but he did not have the courage to make that hope a reality.

Obama lacks courage. Courage trumps hope. Hope gets you no where unless you have the courage required.

Courage precedes hope, because courage is what gets you moving when you do not even have hope.

Nick Mulgrave

What did people expect when they voted for a President who ripped off from the Bob the Builder theme song as his campaign slogan.